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IBM is doubling down on its cloud computing initiative as it continues to redefine its business model in a marketplace that is less dependent on the complex hardware, software and services packages that once were its bread and butter. On Tuesday, the company -- which has quietly invested more than $4 billion over the past several years to bolster its hosted services offerings -- unveiled a new family of cloud products for the C-suite, including Big Data and analytics solutions for risk assessment, procurement and marketing applications.

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Small businesses are increasingly relying on mobile technology and bring-your-own-device, but new findings reveal the majority of them are not employing the proper security protocols for protecting smartphones from breaches. A new report from Soluto finds that while 42% of polled employees favor more stringent security measures, 61% of companies that manage their IT in-house fail to employ suitable smartphone security settings.

A New York startup is offering to broadcast your earthly Twitter messages into outer space on the off chance they may be read by an extraterrestrial. For the lowly sum of 25 cents, Lone Signal -- whose website officially went live Monday -- will translate users' 144-character messages into binary code and send them with the original text versions 17 light-years away into the solar system Gliese 526.

Platforms that enable enterprises to build and host custom applications are the next big thing in hosted services, according to Forrester Research, which says the emerging platform-as-a-service sector will move into spaces currently dominated by IaaS and SaaS vendors. "Public cloud platforms are the keys that unlock the flexibility, productivity, and economic advantages of cloud computing," Forrester said in a recent report on the public cloud platform market.

About a third of companies are able to identify a data breach within minutes, according to a report from McAfee, while 22% need at least a day and 5% require a week to detect a data break-in. "This study has shown what we've long suspected -- that far too few organizations have real-time access to the simple question 'Am I being breached?' Only by knowing this can you stop it from happening," McAfee's Mike Fey says. A major culprit is Big Data, because most companies do not have the means to examine and store it, McAfee says.

Microsoft and the FBI this month led an effort to rescue 2 million or more PCs that were being manipulated by Citadel botnets, which used the computers to steal money from accounts at financial institutions including Bank of America, HSBC, Royal Bank of Canada and Credit Suisse. Most of the infected PCs were in Europe, Hong Kong and the U.S., according to Microsoft's Richard Domingues Boscovich.